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All posts for the month April, 2009

The Wiki Way: Intro

Posted by Kenneth Ristau on April 28, 2009
Posted in: Technology, Writings. Tagged: , , , .

Why use a Wiki to document your IT infrastructure (or your clients’)? What are some of the Good Things about using a Wiki, and how can you amplify them to your advantage? What are some of the Bad Things inherent to using a Wiki and how can you tame or control them?

With this series of posts, I hope to help answer a few of the above questions, perhaps bring up (and answer) a few more questions, and recount my personal experiences using a Wiki to document IT infrastructure for my employers and clients over the past five or so years.

Keeping with my site’s informal theme, I’m not going to draw up an outline or try to structure this. Instead, I intend to think about these questions and tie them to some personal experience which illustrates them.

While my personal experience lies in documenting IT infrastructure, I hope the ideas I present here are general enough that you can apply them to your own experience.

Next post: The Wiki is here to stay!

Better things coming soon. . .

Posted by Kenneth Ristau on April 23, 2009
Posted in: Causes, Food, Photos, Site News, Technology. Tagged: , , , , .

I’ve got a couple of ideas boiling in my head, building up pressure. I’ll be letting them out on this site over the next month or so. In the mean time, here are some updates on older posts.

  • 420 Picture Of The Day# is up to 23 pics.
  • CIALUG meeting minutes for April are missing ‘cause there wasn’t much discussed.
  • For Good Places to Eat in the Des Moines Area add Daddy O’s to the list. Close to my home, and they have Yam Fries! Yummy!
  • Tip: Catching up on podcasts at 2x speed works, but only if you don’t get too far behind. Had to perform some triage on my back log of podcasts this week.
  • SomaFM donation required me to sign up again for PayPal. UGH. Guess that just shows how much I like SomaFM, right?

Favorites: Google Reader

Posted by Kenneth Ristau on April 3, 2009
Posted in: Technology. Tagged: , .

I have to admit, I wasn’t too hot on the idea of RSS feeds when they were first introduced. I was in the habit of visiting each of my favorite Web sites each day to see if they had updated. Early on, I tried a few RSS feed readers and browser plug-ins. I wasn’t impressed.

That all changed about a year ago when I started adding those sites’ RSS feeds into Google Reader. As of today, I subscribe to a total of 18 feeds. I like the fact that is Web-based and not a plugin because I can access my feeds from just about any browser or computer (and I do get around in that regard).

I’m sure most of the other feed readers I tried have improved a lot since I last gave them a go, but I’m happy with Google Reader, and I’m sticking with it.